354 Future approach to Council recruitment PDF 228 KB
[Report of the Director for Transformation, Customers and Resources. To be introduced by the Leader of the Council]
Report to set out the Council's approach to future recruitment of staff.
Minutes:
The Leader introduced the report which set out the future approach to Council recruitment following the end of the current contract with Hays in 2021. The new approach would focus on providing more employment opportunities for Haringey residents, reducing reliance on recruitment agencies to source staff and achieving value for money.
The Leader outlined that the Hays contract for recruitment to permanent and temporary worker roles ends on 21 July 2021. Permanent recruitment was being brought in-house and would be delivered by the Council’s enhanced Human Resources team in April 2021.
The Council has three key objectives that it aimed to achieve when considering future options for recruiting temporary staff going forward. These were:
It was considered that moving to a ‘Neutral Vendor’ supplier contract would support the delivery of these policy objectives.
In response to questions from Cllr Cawley- Harrison, the following was noted:
With regards to the changes in place to take forward withdrawal from the Hays contract, the Council were now in a position to procure a better contract and put in place an alternative which was better , costly more effective, and delivered to more Haringey residents.
In relation to the cost of the contract , it was set out in the report that the majority of the cost was salaries as the company that completes the recruitment of temporary workers also pays the salaries of workers. Therefore, this was not profit for the contractor. The Council would be saving £800k from this new process and this will bring £3.2m savings over 4 years and enable more of this spend to remain local.
When exploring the type of staff recruited temporarily, there were a lot of social workers and this was a fluid market for recruitment . However, it was important to ensure access to vital staff to look after residents.
The ultimate objective was to recruit more Haringey residents and make working for the Council a viable and achievable objective. This also helped save money for the council and enabled spend to remain local.
The benchmarking of the success of this policy could be taken forward by scrutiny. However, the Leader outlined that the more local people that are recruited the more successful the policy would be. This decision would involve engaging more with local recruitment agents and the council were also seeking to create a route into permanent recruitment and permanent employment by building a talent pool. This would further enable more local working and more local spending.
After considering exempt information at item 27,
RESOLVED